Vopak, based in the Netherlands, is the world’s leading independent tank storage company with 67 terminals in 25 countries. They operate a global network of terminals located at strategic locations along major trade routes. With a 400-year history and a strong focus on safety and sustainability, Vopak ensures efficient, safe and clean storage and handling of bulk liquid products and gases, such as oil, chemicals, liquid natural gas, biofuels and vegoils, for their customers. In Deer Park, Texas, Vopak’s terminal offers its tank storage space that can be accessed by ships, barges, trucks and trains. Due to regulations and the nature of chemicals and gases, which can be flammable or dangerous, Vopak’s field agents must be cautions and provide a tremendous amount of documentation in the field.

Oil and Gas

Customer Service

Wisepoint

Results

Increased document retrieval by 25% to now find 99.9% of all documents

Efficiency gains for customer service department

The Challenge

Monitoring the tank storage is essential to Vopak’s business. Documentation and reports on the tanks create massive amounts of paper, which was then stored and saved for years. Steve Spedding, Service Level Manager in the Americas Division, who focuses on IT related projects, was part of the team that knew there was a better way than collecting and storing all their documents that were continuously growing larger. They currently saved the paper documents in filing cabinets and then sent them to Iron Mountain to store the files as there was not enough room onsite. The Vopak team knew that digitizing and classifying their documents would reduce paper files and storage capacity along while extracting the data could be helpful and easy to find for their customer service department.

The Solution

The Vopak team turned to advanced document capture experts at WisePoint as their implementation partner to install and configure Ephesoft’s platform for advanced document capture technology. WisePoint’s role was to delve into a comprehensive requirement evaluation and then product selection that illuminated why Ephesoft’s capabilities far exceeded other competing products. Spedding connected WisePoint to work directly with Vopak’s customer service department to capture data from their documents. The customer service department is made up of 10 employees and typically handles 200 to 400 documents daily, with each document containing an average of 5 to 10 pages, and some going up to 40 pages. “Training the team was easy. It only took a one hour session on how to use Ephesoft for most of the team. A few others required an extra 15 minutes of training, so it was simple,” said Eddie Morace, Testing & Implementation Coordinator, who was closely involved from the start of the project in 2015.

Since there was no previous scanning, the front end of prepping and ingesting the documents into a scanner created a new set of work to do, while eliminating the manual filing. The real efficiency gains were seen on the backend for document retrieval. “We can now find documents in literally 15 seconds,” praised Morace. In fact, the department went through an internal audit, where Morace explained, “We can find 99.9% of documents in our Google Drive repository, whereas before we could only find 75-80% of documents in our hard copy files. This is a significant improvement in our processes and increases accuracy. Having documents being misplaced is no longer an issue.”

Additionally, for external auditing, Vopak has seen impressive process efficiencies. “For audits, it would take us two to three weeks to prepare all the documents. Now, it only takes us a few hours,” explained Morace.

After the system went live, Vopak realized they were collecting too much data, so they simplified their initial requirements to reduce the volume of what was being captured. “We were quite happy with the Ephesoft software and the efforts of WisePoint, who worked with our group to make the changes. They are a good group to work with and I would recommend them,” stated Spedding.

“The Ephesoft platform is a powerful software system and very useful.”

— Steve Spedding, Service Level Manager at Vopak

Oil and Gas

Customer Service

Wisepoint

Results

Audits went from 2-3 weeks to several hours

Can find documents in 15 seconds

Increased document retrieval by 25% to now find 99.9% of all documents